Menu

Is it too late to be saved from “secular privilege”?

From Andrea Palplant Dilley’s interview with political scientist Mary Poplin at Christianity Today:

Dilley: How would you define “secular privilege,” a term introduced by David Hodge in one of the essays in your book?

Poplin: Here’s a great example. When [US Senator] Dianne Feinstein interviews a candidate, Amy Barrett, for a judgeship, she presumes that she herself is neutral and that this candidate is not neutral just because she’s an orthodox Catholic. Bernie Sanders did the same to another appointee. But, of course, Feinstein has a worldview, too. Barrett doesn’t believe in abortion, she’s been active in Catholic organizations … all that gets brought up. In the interview, Feinstein asked the question: How can [Barrett] make good judgments if she holds a religious worldview?

So the purpose of the book is to make explicit that secularism is a sort of umbrella of ideologies defined by its exclusion of religion, primarily of Christian voices, certainly in the US and Europe. Secularism defines itself by what it is not; it has no agreed-upon moral compass, so it’s an umbrella for anything from the far right to the far left and everything in between—as long as it’s not religious. As Stanley Fish says, secularism has survived by pretending to be neutral, but it’s anything but neutral. More.

Reality check: Increasingly, people who vote for progressives – if they have any doubts about the progressive agenda – are voting themselves off the planet.